UTIA researcher to receive award from the Soil and Water Conservation Society

Sindhu Jagadamma to be recognized for her research on soil health and management

2025-06-23

(Press-News.org) Sindhu Jagadamma, associate professor of soil science at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, will receive the Soil and Water Conservation Society’s 2025 Conservation Research Award at the society’s annual conference in August.

Soil health is critical for sustainable food production, and Jagadamma’s research in her Sustainable Soil Management Lab are developing ways to mitigate soil and environmental problems associated with conventional farm management practices. Her team studies how to maintain soil health through the implementation of conservation management, such as use of organic soil amendments and practices like no-till, cover crops and crop rotation.

The Conservation Research Award recognizes Soil and Water Conservation Society members or teams of members whose research has led to exceptional improvements in soil conservation, water conservation and related natural resources research. The members of this international organization include researchers, administrators, Extension specialists, students, producers, policymakers, U.S. Department of Agriculture employees, educators and more.

“This prestigious national award is a strong testament and recognition of Sindhu’s remarkable research accomplishments and impacts among her professional peers,” said UT AgResearch Dean Hongwei Xin.

Jagadamma also collaborates with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, focusing on understanding the response of ecosystem carbon and nutrient cycles to abiotic and biotic changes. Her team uses stable carbon and nitrogen isotope techniques and finer-scale instrumentations in innovative lab and field experiments. She has secured more than $70 million in total grants, including 10 USDA-NIFA awards for which she is principal investigator or a named Co-PI.

Jagadamma’s degrees are all in the studies of soil science and agronomy. She received her B.S. in agricultural sciences from Kerala Agricultural University in India and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from The Ohio State University. She began her work at the University of Tennessee as a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Engineering in 2014 and then moved to UTIA as an assistant professor in 2016.

“I dedicate this award to my incredible lab members, whose drive for excellence and hard work made this achievement possible. I am also deeply grateful for the continued support from UT AgResearch and the Department of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science for the growth of my research program,” she said.

The University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture is comprised of the Herbert College of Agriculture, UT College of Veterinary Medicine, UT AgResearch and UT Extension. Through its land-grant mission of teaching, research and outreach, the Institute touches lives and provides Real. Life. Solutions. to Tennesseans and beyond. utia.tennessee.edu.

END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

HSE linguists study how bilinguals use phrases with numerals in Russian

2025-06-23

Researchers at HSE University analysed over 4,000 examples of Russian spoken by bilinguals for whom Russian is a second language, collected from seven regions of Russia. They found that most non-standard numeral constructions are influenced not only by the speakers’ native languages but also by how frequently these expressions occur in everyday speech. For example, common phrases like 'two hours' or 'five kilometres’ almost always match the standard literary form, while less familiar expressions—especially ...

Cold winters halt the northward spread of species in a warming climate

2025-06-23

As the climate warms, many species are shifting northward into areas that were previously too cold for them. A new study on the wall brown butterfly, published in the scientific journal PNAS, shows that rapid evolution can aid this process – but only up to a point. Cold winters stop further expansion beyond certain climatic limits. “Our results show that even though the butterflies adapt their life cycle as they move northwards, there are limits that evolution cannot easily overcome,” says Mats Ittonen, one of the lead authors of the study done by researchers at the Department of Zoology, Stockholm University. The wall brown (Lasiommata ...

Study finds early signs of widespread coastal marsh decline

2025-06-23

Researchers have revealed the declining health of coastal marshes several years before visible signs of decline, providing an early warning and opportunity to protect an ecosystem that serves as the first line of defense against coastal flooding. Scientists from Colorado State University, the University of Georgia and the University of Texas at Austin developed a model to detect early signs of marsh decline using satellite observations. The model identified vulnerable marshes along Georgia’s coast by ...

Massive burps of carbon dioxide led to oxygen-less ocean environments in the deep past

2025-06-23

New research from the University of California, Davis, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Texas A&M University reveals that massive emissions, or burps, of carbon dioxide from natural earth systems led to significant decreases in ocean oxygen concentrations some 300 million years ago. Combining geochemical analyses of sediment cores and advanced climate modeling, the study, published June 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlights five periods when significant decreases in ocean oxygen levels (by 4% to 12%) coincided with significant increases ...

US muslims’ attitudes toward psychedelic therapy

2025-06-23

A new study in the peer-reviewed journal Psychedelic Medicine demonstrated in this sample that Muslims living in the United States (MLUS) showed moderate openness to psychedelics in mental health therapy. Click here to read the article now. MLUS have a history of rejecting mental health services. Syed Fayzan Rab, MD, a researcher at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, and coauthors of the study, reported a weak negative correlation between rejection attitudes toward mental health and acceptance of psychedelics. “Moderate openness to psychedelics ...

HSE scientists reveal how staying at alma mater can affect early-career researchers

2025-06-23

Many early-career scientists continue their academic careers at the same university where they studied, a practice known as academic inbreeding. A researcher at the HSE Institute of Education analysed the impact of academic inbreeding on publication activity in the natural sciences and mathematics. The study found that the impact is ambiguous and depends on various factors, including the university's geographical location, its financial resources, and the state of the regional academic employment market. A paper with the study findings has been published in Research Policy. In Russia, nearly half of all PhD holders continue working ...

Durham University scientists reveal new cosmic insights as first Rubin Observatory images released

2025-06-23

-With images- The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has today released its long-awaited first images of the night sky, marking the beginning of the most ambitious astronomical survey in history – the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). This significant project, over two decades in the making, will provide an ultra-high-definition, time-lapse view of the southern sky over the next ten years, capturing the evolution of the Universe in motion. Each night, the Rubin Observatory ...

Emotional and directional enabled programmable flexible haptic interface for enhanced cognition in disabled community

2025-06-23

Background The advancements in tactile perception and feedback technologies have propelled the interaction between humans and the digital realm, spurring innovative applications across various fields, including virtual reality, augmented reality, disability assistance, and communication. At present, surface tactile feedback devices predominantly operate through two mechanisms: electrical stimulation and mechanical vibration. Electrical stimulation works by directly stimulating nerves with an electric current, ...

Music on the brain: exploring how songs boost memory

2025-06-23

Music improves mood and memory to such an extent that treatment strategies for diseases like Alzheimer’s or dementia sometimes incorporate music. But how music boosts memory remains unclear. In a new JNeurosci paper, Kayla Clark, from Rice University, and Stephanie Leal, from University of California, Los Angeles, explored what features of music improve memory in humans. After study participants viewed images of everyday experiences, the researchers played music and manipulated its features. Some features—like whether songs were happy or sad, or song familiarity—had ...

Non-contact and nanometer-scale measurement of shallow PN junction depth buried in Si wafers

2025-06-23

Si LSI manufacturing technology is essential as the foundation of modern society. However, there was no wafer-scale technology for rapid, non-destructive, and non-contact evaluation of the internal electric field distribution, carrier transport characteristics, defects, and high-speed response of devices, which are being miniaturized and made three-dimensional to achieve high-density integration of electronic devices. In a new paper published in Light: Science & Applications, an international team of scientists ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology: Higher doses of semaglutide can safely enhance weight loss and improve health for adults living with obesity, two new clinical trials confirm